Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Amazon EC2 vs Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on May 21, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.5
Amazon EC2 reduces long-term costs through scalability, efficient resource management, and decreased infrastructure expenses, enhancing innovation and agility.
Sentiment score
5.6
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling offers substantial ROI, over 50% for high loads, outperforming GCP, with cost-effective instance deployment.
I would say I have saved more than a week with Amazon EC2 compared to my previous on-premises setup.
Architect at a outsourcing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.7
Amazon EC2 customer service satisfaction varies; premium support praised, free support criticized, and experiences differ based on needs.
Sentiment score
7.3
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling support is highly rated for responsiveness and effectiveness, despite challenges with third-party integrations.
They have very good support.
Cloud Architect Consultant at T-Systems International
I would rate the technical support of AWS a nine, as their team resolves issues effectively and meets our expectations.
Senior AWS Consultant at Quantum Integrators
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Amazon EC2's scalability impresses users with autoscaling, resource flexibility, and efficient cost-performance optimization for diverse organizational needs.
Sentiment score
7.4
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling efficiently adapts to demand changes, supporting scalability with features like load balancing and server automation.
The scaling feature appears to be embedded in the Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling price.
Senior Analyst - Data Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Amazon EC2 is highly stable and reliable, with minor issues mitigated by best practices like multiple availability zones.
Sentiment score
8.1
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is praised for its stability, resilience, and effective performance, with up to 99% reported uptime.
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling should automatically scale out systems during high demand and scale in new instances when demand decreases.
Scrum Master/ Agile Coach at Porch Group
The stability of Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling rates a 10.
Senior Analyst - Data Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon EC2 faces criticism for complexity, high costs, and limited integration, with calls for better automation and innovation.
Enhancements needed in scalability, customization, integration, documentation, UI, pricing, predictive scaling, security, and vertical scaling for Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling.
I have heard from multiple people that if you have an Amazon EC2 instance running and you stop it, the billing continues unless you terminate the Amazon EC2 instance.
Senior Software Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
I think improvements can be made to Amazon EC2 by increasing the memory, offering more instance types, and including GPUs as mentioned in the keynote.
Architect at a outsourcing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Amazon should provide more detailed training materials for people who are just starting to work with Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling.
Cloud Architect at Acmegrade
Integration with LLM would be beneficial as many services are implementing this functionality.
Senior Analyst - Data Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
In enterprise environments such as healthcare or banking with numerous instances running different applications, customizable policies allow appropriate scaling.
Scrum Master/ Agile Coach at Porch Group
 

Setup Cost

Amazon EC2 pricing is seen as cost-effective but complex, urging simplification for easier cost management and estimation.
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling offers flexible pricing based on usage, with careful management needed to control potential costs.
It operates on a pay-as-you-go model, meaning if a machine is used for only an hour, the pricing will be calculated for that hour only, not the entire month.
Cloud Architect at Acmegrade
In some projects, incorrect decisions were made by not consulting them first, resulting in higher setup and maintenance costs.
Scrum Master/ Agile Coach at Porch Group
 

Valuable Features

Amazon EC2 offers scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency with strong security, making it ideal for diverse workloads and AWS integration.
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling ensures efficient demand scaling, cost-effectiveness, and seamless integration with CloudWatch for optimal resource management.
With the cloud, deployment is easy, and within a minute, we can deploy the server and give it to the developers so they can work on it right away after deployment.
Architect at a outsourcing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Amazon EC2 offers flexibility.
Senior Software Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
The service offers 99.9999% availability.
Senior Analyst - Data Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
The best feature I appreciate about Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is its health check functionality; when a server becomes unreachable or enters an unhealthy state, it automatically triggers an alert, and the load balancer responds by spinning up a new server, ensuring that traffic is distributed effectively.
Senior AWS Consultant at Quantum Integrators
This pre-configuration makes on-demand scaling refined, and the configuration includes automatic traffic distribution because when the first system is overloaded, new incoming traffic is redirected to the newly created systems.
Scrum Master/ Agile Coach at Porch Group
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon EC2
Ranking in Compute Service
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
Ranking in Compute Service
4th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
51
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Compute Service category, the mindshare of Amazon EC2 is 12.5%, up from 6.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is 7.4%, down from 11.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Compute Service Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon EC212.5%
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling7.4%
Other80.1%
Compute Service
 

Featured Reviews

BS
AWS Architect at Corvit Networks
Elasticity and auto scaling enhance performance and cost efficiency
Amazon EC2 features that I have found the most valuable and useful include elasticity and scalability, a variety of instance types, pay-as-you-go pricing, security, isolation, AMIs, integration with other services, Spot Instances, and high availability of reliability, user data, and EC2 metadata. These include Amazon EC2 images, image builder, and auto scaling as instance types, pricing models, and security with VPC, IAM roles, and security groups. The most beneficial features of Amazon EC2 for cloud operations are EC2 Auto Scaling with Elastic Load Balancing, which allows scale up and scale down, maintains high availability, and optimizes costs. Auto Scaling provides fault tolerance, performance optimization, and cost efficiency. A real-world benefit is that an instance automatically handles the load. When traffic drops, it reduces the number of instances. Other highly beneficial Amazon EC2 features include Spot Instances, multiple instance types, custom AMIs, VPC security groups, strong network and access security, and Elastic IPs, which are the static IPs for dynamic instances.
Karthikeyan Ganesan - PeerSpot reviewer
Scrum Master/ Agile Coach at Porch Group
Offers automatic scaling features but can improve user interface and setup guidance
Customizable policies help us determine how scaling should occur. In enterprise environments such as healthcare or banking with numerous instances running different applications, customizable policies allow appropriate scaling. For critical servers, we can set up a higher number of new instances to scale out to prevent downtime. For less critical servers that perform simple tasks such as file copying, we can use customizable policies to scale out minimal instances to avoid unnecessary expenses or cloud costs. Regarding integration, there are some disadvantages in AWS where certain availability zones or regions experience glitches. This can cause production halts because of problems on Amazon's side. In particular regions, when integrating Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling or other services, there might be delays in creating new Amazon EC2 instances, sometimes becoming inefficient.
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Compute Service solutions are best for your needs.
885,286 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Marketing Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
7%
Transportation Company
7%
University
7%
University
9%
Marketing Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Performing Arts
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business30
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise28
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business12
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise27
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon EC2?
The scalability and elasticity are helpful.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon EC2?
Advice on Setup Cost, Pricing, and Licensing for EC2: 1. Start Small & Use Free Tier if Possible For new users or small applications, the AWS Free Tier offers limited EC2 usage free for 12 mont...
What needs improvement with Amazon EC2?
I think improvements can be made to Amazon EC2 by increasing the memory, offering more instance types, and including GPUs as mentioned in the keynote. In the future, I think you could explore quant...
What do you like most about Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling?
The solution removes the need for hardware. We can easily create servers or machines. Just by clicking or specifying our requirements, like memory size or disk space, it's set up for us. The tool e...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling?
Regarding licensing and setup costs, we always study in detail using lower environments such as User Acceptance Testing or sandbox environments. Before creation, we consult AWS official documentati...
What needs improvement with Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling?
I don't work with predictive scaling. I know this feature, but I have never worked with it. For me, availability is something different. If you want to set up your application to be highly availabl...
 

Also Known As

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2
AWS RAM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Netflix, Expedia, TimeInc., Novaris, airbnb, Lamborghini
Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon EC2 vs. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
885,286 professionals have used our research since 2012.